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Back in 1998, I was working in the filthy world of trade. I’d received this book from Mises.org one morning and had to wait until lunchtime before I could read it. I then sat in my car in a dreary supermarket car park and opened it up. It took less than an hour to get through. However, the clarity, the penetration, the directness, the sheer thrill of all those dense scales falling from my eyes melted my mind. Who was this Mises? And why had he made me feel so very uncomfortable?

Via the pages of this book, Mises had told me the truth about life, the universe, and everything. He’d tumbled the monuments in my mind, to Marx, by taking a wrecking ball to them.

This book essentially details the societally destructive power of human envy. Like a fine Bossa Nova dancer in perfect tune with his own epistemological theory, Mises slices and slashes at the tenets of Marxism until there’s nothing left but malevolent dust.

He begins with the social characteristics of capitalism and the psychological causes of its vilification. Although almost every line on every page could be quoted, Mises first of all defines the wonder of the capitalist system:

The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way. Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers. The capitalists lose their funds as soon as they fail to invest them in those lines in which they satisfy best the demands of the public. In a daily repeated plebiscite in which every penny gives a right to vote the consumers determine who should own and run the plants, shops and farms.

However, when capitalism came in, a lot of people hated this new way of doing things, particularly those who’d had feudal sinecures, guild privileges, and so on. Competition can make life painful. Ask anyone who’s lost a prized lover to someone else. It hurts. And so a multi-century war began between those who’d once had landed privileges gifted upon them, and the capitalists, who used free markets to strip away those privileges.

After the feudal age, capitalism produced such plenty and such wealth that many also began to take it for granted. We see this of course today, with gentrified socialists toting iPhones and business class flight tickets to Bali. They lack any idea as to where all this wealth came from. It’s just there when they wake up in the morning and if they do think about it at all, they think it’s just part of nature. However, nature actually used to exist for all of us as dire poverty, with most of us scrabbling around with sticks trying to scare away big cat predators from the remains of hunted carcasses. Vultures used to come before us in nature’s pecking order.

In this this new post-feudal world, people now had to survive on their wits and their merit, but most of all, on their ability to happily satisfy the needs of others. And when you come up short on such abilities, or wish to engage in leisure pursuits rather than serving the needs of others, then you’ll go without. And whose fault is this? Is it you, the worthy and perennial cognoscenti who wishes to dedicate your important life to studying Proust, or is it the fault of the evil capitalists?

Another better man comes along and takes away your business with better products and lower prices. Others love him and you become relatively poorer as a result. Is it because of your failings in comparison to him or is the fault of the evil capitalists?

These uncomfortable questions about your relative failure continue to pour out, but the answer always stays the same. I am perfect. Capitalism is evil.

In this initial section, Mises then moves away from the common man’s experience and explains a ruling elite’s hatred of capitalism:

The wealth of an aristocrat is not a market phenomenon; it does not originate from supplying the consumers and cannot be withdrawn or even affected by any action on the part of the public. It stems from conquest or from largess on the part of a conqueror. It may come to an end through revocation on the part of the donor or through violent eviction on the part of another conqueror, or it may be dissipated by extravagance. The feudal lord does not serve consumers and is immune to the displeasure of the populace.

Mises then cascades through group after group and explains why and how they became anti-capitalistic, including the intellectuals, the limousine liberals, and the politicians, to name but a handful. A fun section bubbles up when he investigates the perennial socialistic attitudes of the entertainment profession, particularly as exemplified by the celebrities of Hollywood, where an eternally fickle market can turn you from a megastar into a former has-been on the strength of one poor box-office performance.

On the surface, it may seem strange why a member of such an outwardly wealthy group can espouse communism from inside a gated palatial mansion, usually while drowning in champagne and dollar bills at the same time. However, Mises explains it beautifully. To summarise, Mises believes envious ignorant jealousy defiantly tries to ram a poisoned stake into the heart of capitalism.

He then moves on to deal with how ordinary people perceive capitalism.

Before doing so, he sets out how capitalism achieved such enormous productivity improvements in global wealth, as compared to the feudal age:

The characteristic feature of the market economy is the fact that it allots the greater part of the improvements brought about by the endeavors of the three progressive classes – those saving, those investing the capital goods and those elaborating new methods for the employment of capital goods – to the nonprogressive majority of people.

He points out how most people remain unaware of how wealth generation works. Most simply put it down to inevitable human progress. As basic human nature constantly drives us to be inevitably dissatisfied with even an immediate improvement over a current situation – a state which Mises applauds as being absolutely necessary for constant economic improvement – these dissatisfactions almost invariably get blamed on capitalism.

A man may have a 12-inch black-and-white television. Then he hankers for a 20-inch colour television. He achieves this, but his neighbour instead buys a 48-inch flatscreen, which the first man may feel unable to afford. Obviously, the unworthy hand of evil capitalism has generated this unbearable situation!

Of course, to add to this, the political elite classes, who hate capitalism even more, take this basic societal dissatisfaction and then massage it with all the vindictive tools at their disposal. Or as Mises puts it:

We are all socialists now. But today governments, political parties, teachers and writers, militant anti-theists as well as Christian theologians are almost unanimous in passionately rejecting the market economy and praising the alleged benefits of state omnipotence. The rising generation is brought up in an environment that is engrossed in socialist ideas.

We now move on to what I consider the most interesting part of the book. Here, Mises elaborates upon the mass market for literary products to help further explain how an undercurrent of Marxist cultural subversion has constantly eroded a once fervent general belief in classical liberalism.

For instance, because capitalism gets formed from a crucible of pure evil, the often murderous perpetrator in many detective stories must have made his fortune through decadent evil means too, devilishly exploiting the innocent and the good along the way. Thus, capitalism gets literally equated in such stories with murder. Or as Mises puts it:

The detective story debases the plot and introduces into it the cheap character of the self-righteous sleuth who takes delight in humiliating a man whom all people considered as an impeccable citizen.

While you’re still breathing, Mises then tackles the non-economic objections to capitalism. These intertwine themselves from two completely opposing ideas. The first anti-materialistic one decrees that the products of capitalism, for example, a 48-inch flatscreen television, fail to make people intrinsically happy. Mises acknowledges this. But it’s hardly capitalism’s fault, he says, that people desire such material things, which capitalism then dutifully produces for them. Yes, they may desire a 72-inch flatscreen television as soon as the 48-inch one is delivered, but without capitalism, most people would slave away as serfs in a medieval field picking turnips with a spike.

The second contradicting pro-materialist argument, projects that capitalism encapsulates evil because in a perfect world, a large flatscreen television would get delivered on the same day to everyone in the world. Mises thinks this nonsensical social justice view spins out from a distorted mental impediment:

Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the most clever and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little. The innovation is first a luxury of only a few people, until by degrees it comes into the reach of the many. It is not a sensible objection to the use of shoes or of forks that they spread only slowly and that even today millions do without them.

After exploring both of these important and totally contradictory hypotheses, Mises then works through the usual religious resistance to capitalism – as exemplified by the current Pope – along with a whole smorgasbord of other related historical and cultural hangovers from the past, most of them gumming up the otherwise smoothly operating gears of capitalism.

In the book’s final section, Mises conclusively writes a passionate defence of both freedom and classical liberal thinking:

In the universe there is never and nowhere stability and immobility. Change and transformation are essential features of life. Each state of affairs is transient; each age is an age of transition. In human life there is never calm and repose. Life is a process, not a perseverance in a status quo. Yet the human mind has always been deluded by the image of an unchangeable existence. The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

He also sticks a finely-tooled Viennese artillery officer’s riding boot into the pampered derriere of our common enemy, the Leftist intellectuals:

The vain arrogance of the literati and the Bohemian artists dismisses the activities of the businessmen as unintellectual money-making. The truth is that the entrepreneurs and promoters display more intellectual faculties and intuition than the average writer and painter. The inferiority of many self-styled intellectuals manifests itself precisely in the fact that they fail to recognize what capacity and reasoning power are required to develop and to operate successfully a business enterprise.

Anyhow, I hope that’s enough to at least provide you with a flavour of this magnificent little book. Unless you’ve done so already, I strongly advise you to download it and to take it out for a quick spin around the block. Though do try to pick somewhere nicer than a supermarket car park to read it. Make it somewhere glorious instead, such as the top of a spine-chilling mountain or a splendid beach-side restaurant in the Mediterranean.

This book forms a quark-condensed version of Mises at his absolute finest!

Andy Duncan is an expert on financial derivatives and lectures on the topic in New York, London, Dubai, and Singapore. This article first appeared at mises.org.

The seven major positive emotions are routinely used in creative efforts and are synonymous with happiness and the kind of success that the reader should strive to emulate or attain (within reason, of course). On the other hand, the seven major negative emotions are regularly expressed by people who are a drain on the soul and probably on a downward spiral personally, professionally, and financially.

Fast-forwarded to the late 2010s, what type of thorn in the side of decent, hardworking, and traditional people in the United States best embodies the seven major negative emotions? Why, it’s none other than social justice warriors.

I. The Emotion Of Fear

The life of an SJW is filled with irrational fears and slippery-slope diatribes that breach the level of absurdity.

For instance, when Donald Trump was elected president, they thought he was “literally Hitler!” and was going to strip all women, homosexuals, and non-whites (essentially everyone but straight white males) of their civil liberties.

None of these hyperbole-laced arguments has come to pass.

The United States continues to be one of the top countries in the world that offers its women, as well as its racial and sexual minorities, an astoundingly high degree of civil liberties, protections, and even outright privileges that white men cannot take advantage of.

II. The Emotion of Jealousy

SJWs exhibit a truly remarkable level of jealousy, particularly when it comes to financial compensation and the general topic of income inequality.

Many of them find it the crime of the century that petroleum engineers who studied diligently for many years, only to then have to work in some of the most unpleasant conditions imaginable, actually make more money than McDonald’s burger-flippers or pumpkin spice latte-decorators at Starbucks.

Oh, the horror! But it’s (insert current year)! Society should have total income equality by now!

III. The Emotion of Hatred

In recent years, this level of hatred has reached such breaking points to where they tear down public monuments, smash bike locks over people’s heads, and aggressively harass people on the streets of Portland and elsewhere.

Constant hatred can never be channeled into something constructive, and being constructive is not the forte of SJWs.

IV. The Emotion of Revenge

SJWs repeatedly espouse “love” and “equality” for everyone, but it’s pure folly to ignore that revenge against white men is a core component of their manifesto.

In their narrow-minded world, white men (and white men only) have been the source of all suffering and wrongdoing on this planet, and their ascent to power and wealth has come only through female oppression, slavery, land and resource theft from abroad, wars of conquest, and a laundry list of other naughty endeavors.

(To them, major atrocities committed by non-whites such as the Barbary pirates and their Islamic slave trade, Islamic invasions of Europe, Chinese civil wars with eight-figure body counts, the conquests of Tamerlane, the brutality of Imperial Japan, the Rwandan genocide, the ongoing existence of slavery in Mauritania, and the ongoing mass murder and rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo simply don’t compute.)

This thirst for revenge against white men can be achieved only by displacing as many white men as possible from prestigious jobs, tearing down as many statues of white men as possible, and then working hard to have their polar opposite as the replacement. Harriet Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson on the U.S. twenty-dollar bill and the high-profile smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh are perfect examples.

V. The Emotion of Greed

SJWs are a greedy lot, and many of them increasingly act like all sources of financial stress and toil in life should be eliminated via their “it’s the current year” arguments.

Housing? That should be free. Rides on the subway? Those should be free, too. The latest and greatest smartphone offering? Free! The cost of my gender studies degree? Oh, you know that’s gotta be free.

Heck, they’ll think round-trip airfares to Thailand so they can hug elephants for their Instagram feed should be free before long.

VI. The Emotion of Superstition

One of the primary descriptors of “superstition” is assuming false conceptions of causation, and SJWs are riddled with such poor modes of thinking. For instance, don’t even try making a civil and intellectual argument with them about the highly disproportionate black crime rates in the United States.

Despite overwhelming empirical evidence and data that show that it is primarily poor life choices (made under free will) that leads to so many young black men being incarcerated, SJWs will superstitiously insist that only the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and “white supremacy” have created this problem.

VII. The Emotion of Anger

SJWs are always angry and almost never genuinely happy or content. There’s always something or someone out there who must be “resisted” in some way.

Around such people, no trash can is safe from being picked up and hurled in a fit of anger if someone you don’t like is about to give a speech at the local university. Just a simple speech!

People who are constantly angry are awful to work with, a complete social buzzkill, and are probably not succeeding in their personal and professional lives.

In summary, avoid SJWs and all their negative emotions. Choose winners.

“Social” justice will not permit individual freedom. Social justice warriors observe that the results of the spontaneous order of the market are not distributed equally. “Someone” must be to blame. Therefore, they must be punished. Their property must be involuntarily transferred to others.

To Hayek, this is primitive thinking by immature minds. Why? Because they can not comprehend the impersonal process of the market – one which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve. Instead, they “anthropomorphize” or “personalize” the market – they think of it as the deliberate acts of some individuals who are “in charge”, and must be brought to heel.

Social Justice Will Lead Straight To Socialism.

This conception of “social justice” says Hayek, leads straight to full-fledged socialism. It requires a social organization to assign particular shares of the product of the economic system to particular individuals or groups. It assumes the moral duty to create a power that can achieve an approved pattern of distribution.

Social justice is the most widely used and most effective argument in politics. Every claim for government action on behalf of particular groups is advanced in its name. Opposition is weakened when social justice is invoked. This is so much the case that socialists have abandoned the government ownership of the means of production as their preferred redistribution vehicle, and substituted heavy taxation based on the promise of social justice.

This represents a complete revolution in social order: from a society based on principles of just individual conduct to a society based on government satisfying the demand for social justice, and placing the duty on authorities with the power to command people what to do. Worse, government authority is supplemented and reinforced by other social groups such as the church. Social justice has become a quasi-religious superstition. But, like the superstitious belief in witches and ghosts in earlier historical times, near universal acceptance does not prove validity.

Social Justice Overturns American Values.

Society will become fundamentally different if we succumb to the superstitions of the social justice warriors. We will be forced to abandon individual responsibility, self-reliance, and traditional moral values, and replace these principles with dependence, collectivism and the high time preference of instant gratification.

We will not be able to preserve the benefits of free markets if we impose the requirements of social justice. There will be self-accelerating decline. A dependent group insists on more government action to achieve distributive justice; the government discovers that to achieve the desired outcome, groups must be subject to more and more government control, and the system progressively approaches totalitarianism.

Social Justice Requires Central Control.

If we maintain a system in which everyone is free to choose their occupation, there can be no control over whether or not the results will correspond to the wishes of the social justice warriors. Social justice can only be realized in a centrally controlled system that limits free choices and free action of individuals. Justice can only refer to the way free competition is carried on, not to its results. And we could never decide on the remuneration “deserved” by different activities. When we ask what ought to be the relative remunerations of a nurse or a butcher or a coal miner or a judge, or a deep sea diver or a cleaner of sewers, or the creator of a new industry or computer programmer or a jockey or the jet pilot or the professor, the appeal to social justice does not give us the slightest help in deciding. It must be left to the market.

The word “social” implies that “society” ought to hold itself responsible for the particular material position of all its members and for assuring that each receives what is “due” to them. This implies that “society” has a conscious mind that can be guided by these principles. Ultimately, social justice implies some kind of equality in earnings, and the use of government power to move in the direction of material equality. This is fatal because, to achieve equal outcomes, government can not treat everyone equally. It must tell people what to do, and must take on the arbitrary power to do so. A claim for equality of material position can be granted only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Anyone who is assured remuneration according to some principle that is accepted as constituting “social justice” can not be allowed to decide what he or she is to do. They can’t be allowed to find another occupation or profession; they must stick to the occupation they are assigned for the remuneration assured to them. This is not a system of individual freedom. The rules of social justice are those of the conduct of superiors to their subordinates. The citizens must be subordinate to authority.

We Have No Moral Entitlement To Stable Results From The Market.

Another belief of the social justice warriors is the supposed “social injustice” of losing an economic position that they have been accustomed to. Coal mines and steel mills close, employers downsize or go out of business or move production to another place. There is a “strong and almost universal belief that it is unjust to disappoint legitimate expectations of wealth.” We all prefer that no very great changes will be made to our condition. These changes may look like undeserved strokes of misfortune but they are an indispensable part of the steering mechanism of the market. Negative feedback is the most important data keeping the market dynamic. Constant adaptation to changing circumstances is critical in directing effort to the highest and best use. We have no moral entitlement to stable results from the market. If we were to protect individuals from these market changes, then there would be stasis, and no-one could ever be upwardly mobile or successful.

In the end, the gospel of “social justice” preaches the sordid sentiment of dislike of people who are better off than oneself, or simply envy, the “most anti-social of all passions”. It has nothing to do with justice.

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